Red Hat Enterprise Storage is a software-defined storage technology that solution providers can use to turn industry-standard x86-based servers into enterprise scale-out storage appliances, said Ranga Rangachari, vice president and general manager of Red Hat's storage business unit.

The most recent release from late 2013 also supports OpenStack to provide integrated storage capabilities to the cloud, Rangachari said.
"Most customers want an integrated offering with scale-up storage and capacity," he said.

Red Hat is authorizing certain channel partners to get certified for Red Hat Enterprise Storage through its OPEN program, Rangachari said. "We're now ready to launch," he said. "We've got partners ready to get trained."

Ideal partners for Red Hat Enterprise Storage include those who understand open source, which is a large part of the company's partner base, Rangachari said.
They also likely will have existing delivery practices around data protection, disaster recovery and wide-area replication, and hopefully around the cloud as well, he said.
"But the cloud is really new, and I don't expect a lot of partners do it yet," he said.

In addition, Red Hat is looking to engage partners with its Red Hat OpenShift Platform-as-a-Service offering, said Ashesh Badani, general manager of the cloud business unit and OpenShift PaaS at Red Hat.
OpenShift, which provides a scalable, multitenant and secure platform for developing hybrid cloud applications, is available for traditional Red Hat Enterprise Linux implementations, for applications developed for Amazon Web Services and for private PaaS offerings, Badani said.

The company already has 10 solution provider partners who are OpenShift-ready. "They have the training and skills to talk to customers," he said. "We want to make sure some partners are certified and skilled so that, when they go to a customer, they can have a conversation on OpenShift use cases."

Red Hat also enhanced several parts of OPEN, including significantly improved margins and timing for partners who register deals for net-new customers, Lumpkin said.

While Lumpkin did not reveal how much Red Hat enhanced its registered deal margins, he said the company is now extending the time a deal can be registered by a couple of years, including the original deal and two subsequent renewal periods.